Baudelaire, Charles | John Jeremy (essay date 1981)
John Jeremy (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "Samuel Cramer—Eclectic or Individualist?," in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, May, 1981, pp. 10-21.
[In the following essay, Jeremy maintains that the protagonist of La Fanfarlo is a writer who lacks the intense focus and aesthetic vision of an artistic genius, and therefore represents Baudelaire's fear about himself]
Baudelaire criticism has long been familiar with the idea of Samuel Cramer as the poet's alter ego and of a Baudelaire who treats his fictional counterpart with indulgent irony—"un Baudelaire dont Baudelaire se détache" as Ferran calls him [in L'esthéstique de Baudelaire, 1933]—in order to mock and no doubt also to exorcize his own weaknesses, and to examine, within the secure boundaries of fictional invention, the complexities of his own nature. [In "Baudelaire and Samuel Cramer", Australian Journal of French Studies 6, nos. 2-3] C. A....
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